We were taught in school the vascular system is “plumbing for blood” — tubes that transport nutrients & waste. Vasocomputation suggests this misses 90% of what this system does — the vascular system adaptively shifts tension to help neurons compute
The core hypothesis: vasomuscular tension stabilizes local neural patterns. A sustained thought is a pattern of vascular clenching that reduces dynamic range in nearby neurons. The thought (congealed pattern) persists until the muscle relaxes
Vascular clenches can also lock: smooth muscle has a “latch-bridge mechanism” that glues its actin & myosin together. This “semi-permanent clench” deprives neurons of blood, further preventing updates. We think with clenches; we set Bayesian priors with latches
Tension has physiologically-distinct short- and long-term effects but there’s a unified grammar: tension prevents updating & reduces sensitivity to external patterns, acting as a “side-channel memory” about which part of the neural dynamic range to use
Latches are “frozen compute” — neural patterns that can’t update due to locked vascular tension. We can think of our amount of frozen sensation as our distance from non-dual experience
“Man is born free [but schizo], and everywhere he is in [vascular] chains.” The moments of awakening are when these chains drop, but making yourself epistemologically virtuous enough to handle the freedom can take a long time and starts very boring